Our image. Our reputation as a state that embraces people of diverse backgrounds and makes them feel welcome. And our efforts over many years to retool our economy, to attract talented workers and thriving businesses, and to improve the quality of life for millions of Hoosiers.

All of this is at risk because of a new law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, that no matter its original intent already has done enormous harm to our state and potentially our economic future.

The consequences will only get worse if our state leaders delay in fixing the deep mess created.

Half steps will not be enough. Half steps will not undo the damage.

Only bold action — action that sends an unmistakable message to the world that our state will not tolerate discrimination against any of its citizens — will be enough to reverse the damage.

Gov. Mike Pence and the General Assembly need to enact a state law to prohibit discrimination in employment, housing, education and public accommodations on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

Jay Cre: #12 Targetpractice I get the feeling that Gov. Pence (even though, after all this, he really really doesn't come across as too bright) knew damn well what the IN RFRA bill meant, and was meant to do, and who ...

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has been all over the media yesterday and today, pretending the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” has nothing to do with discriminating against LGBT people, and today he announced that he’d push for a “clarification” of the bill, to show that it doesn’t do that thing everybody knows it does.

Pence has a problem, though; the anti-gay activists who helped ram this bill through the Indiana legislature are opposed to any such clarification, because of course they are.

Micah Clark of the American Family Association’s Indiana chapter, who stood right behind Pence, along with several other Religious Right leaders, when he signed the bill into law and has quite a record of anti-gay activism, said today that he opposes any such clarification.

He told AFA President Tim Wildmon today that conservatives should call Pence and other state officials and demand that they oppose any effort to clarify that the law does not legalize discrimination: “That could totally destroy this bill.” (In Georgia, supporters of a similar bill also opposed a push to ensure that the legislation will not permit discrimination in business.)

Wildmon agreed, adding that the Indiana law is necessary to protect anti-gay business owners from “persecution.” The law’s critics, Wildmon claimed, are waging “spiritual warfare” against state officials.

Here’s a photo originally posted proudly by Micah Clark, showing Clark and several other anti-gay activists standing with Pence when he signed the RFRA, with annotations added by GLAAD to make it very clear that Pence is simply lying about its intent.

nkdeere: #172 Justanotherhuman "My words were wrong. My tone was wrong. My choice of scripture was wrong. Everything I did about that report was wrong,..." He is trying the old GOTP meme. He did NOT apologize for what he said. ...

Spoiler, for those not aware of how the GOP operates: they’re not really shocked. They knew exactly what they were doing. In some circles, this tactic is known as “lying.”

WASHINGTON — Indiana’s Republican leaders said they were shocked, confused and completely caught off-guard by the backlash to their new “religious freedom” law, telling reporters Monday that they had not expected criticism calling the measure anti-gay.

“I don’t think anyone anticipated that the characterization of the bill would be, this denies to services to a specific class to Hoosiers. It does just the opposite. It includes all Hoosiers in the religious freedom standard. And it’s a misperception that it denies services,” said Indiana state House Speaker Brian Bosma (R) during a Monday morning press conference with Indiana Senate President Pro Tem David Long (R).

Long acknowledged that the GOP-controlled legislature did not work with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights groups on crafting the language of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because the lawmakers didn’t think the bill would affect that community.

It is to laugh.

UPDATE at 3/30/15 12:36:00 pm by Charles Johnson

I should point out that critics of this bill understand it’s designed to protect people who deny services to gays. Nobody has said the bill itself “denies services” to LGBT people. This is a classic GOP misdirection.

Jay Cre: #209 ObserverArt This sounds to me more like a replay of a story I read about in a dKos diary: a Republican Congresswoman from Washington set up her website to collate "Obamacare horror stories": and instead, was deluged by ...

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

Our message, to people around the country and around the world, is this: Apple is open. Open to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love. Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination.

Men and women have fought and died fighting to protect our country’s founding principles of freedom and equality. We owe it to them, to each other and to our future to continue to fight with our words and our actions to make sure we protect those ideals. The days of segregation and discrimination marked by “Whites Only” signs on shop doors, water fountains and restrooms must remain deep in our past. We must never return to any semblance of that time. America must be a land of opportunity for everyone.

Todd Kincannon, former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party and unreconstructed hateful racist, was questioned by police last Thursday after threatening his wife and refusing to let her out of the car in a Chick-fil-A parking lot.

Todd Kincannon, a Columbia attorney and former executive director of the S.C. Republican Party, has been accused of threatening his wife and refusing to let her out of his car Thursday night, according to a report from the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. He has not been arrested or charged with any crimes, according to a sheriff’s department spokesman.

The report states that on Thursday at about 10:21 p.m., a sheriff’s deputy responded to Kincannon’s house in Columbia “regarding a possible domestic incident.” The deputy met with Kincannon, who said he and his wife had gotten in an argument about him “touching [his wife’s] leg at a work function.” The report notes that Kincannon “denied any physical altercation and had no signs of such.”

The officer then spoke with Kincannon’s wife, Ashely Suzanne Griffith, who said that they “have a history of unreported domestic violence.” She said she was “extremely fearful” of Kincannon and described him as being “extremely ‘traditional’ and controlling, thus becoming very upset due to embarrassing him,” according to the report.

Kincannon’s accounts on Twitter were recently suspended, after a long history of posting insanely offensive and racist tweets, often advocating or excusing violence. For example, he posted our Most Disgusting Right Wing Tweet About Ray Rice last year. Because his account is suspended, we can’t embed the tweet any more, but this is our saved text version of it:

Janay Rice spits on Ray Rice. He punches her but doesn't knock her out. She tries to punch him back. He punches harder. Who is the bad guy?

Rocky-in-Connecticutre: #3 Eclectic Cyborg no, this is a correct take on the Bible. Also, according to the Bible, possessions include children, slave workers, sex slaves, wives (numerous), entire households, and conquered enemies.

A couple of days ago, our stalker pal Chuck C. Johnson started posting a string of clownish boasts about an article he was planning to publish. Chuck hyped this article as a bombshell exposé of a well-known conservative figure, said he’d been working on it for two years, and dropped a series of hints about sexual harassment and grabbing “tits” (Chuck is nothing if not classy).

I'm going to expose a conservative figure who has been sexually assaulting women for years without punishment. Tomorrow they get justice.

Who knows if there’s any truth to these allegations? It wouldn’t be very surprising, since West has been accused of sexual harassment before; but hey, this is Chuck C. Johnson! And of course, that means it’s based on those anonymous sources for which Chuck has become notorious, and that some observers suspect may exist only in Chuck’s alleged mind.

But shortly after posting this BREAKING EXCLUSIVE BOMBSHELL, Chuck was forced to add his first walk-back, when one of the women he identified as having been groped by West demanded that he correct the record. In typical Chuck fashion, he did this in the most passive aggressive way possible:

West, who was fired from Pajamas Media, grabbed the breast of then 24-year-old, Michelle Fields in front of an elevator while the two of them were colleagues. Fields declined to be interviewed on record but three different sources at PJ Media confirmed this story. (Update: Fields repeatedly and emphatically refused comment on the record and asked that I change her earlier confirmation which I have now done.)

The funniest part of this is that Chuck was immediately, viciously attacked by hordes of angry right wingers who really didn’t cotton to the idea of the Ginger Avenger smearing their idol Allen West, who won the loyalty of the wingnut base by making frequent horrible statements about President Obama. A couple of my favorites:

So far, not a single source in media or blogs has linked approvingly to Chuck’s hit piece. And Chuck seems to dimly realize he screwed this one up, big time; normally he posts at least a dozen links to an article like this on Twitter and rants about it for hours. But this time, he posted just one lonely link — then immediately started tweeting about other subjects.

NCAA tournament analyst Charles Barkley released a statement Friday calling for big events such as the Final Four and the Super Bowl not to be held in Indiana in light of recent legislation in the state that many view as discriminatory against gay, lesbian and transgendered people.

“Discrimination in any form is unacceptable to me,” Barkley said in the statement.

“As long as anti-gay legislation exists in any state, I strongly believe big events such as the Final Four and Super Bowl should not be held in those states’ cities.”

This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Then browse to a site you want to post, select some text on the page to use for a quote, click the bookmarklet, and the Pages posting window will appear with the title, text, and any embedded video or audio files already filled in, ready to go.

Or... you can just click this button to open the Pages posting window right away.

From Sen. Schumer's Facebook page: There are two simple reasons the comparison does not hold water. First, the federal RFRA was written narrowly to protect individuals' religious freedom from government interference unless the government or state had a compelling interest. ...

UPDATE MARCH 30: NEW TIME FOR LIVE STREAM - 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be flying a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on ...

What's this? Another article on Cracked about how incorrigibly tribal-minded us homo sapiens are? Well, yes. But the proverbial devil is in the proverbial details. Proverbially. It's still worth reading. That's what I'm getting at. Everyone is talking about Scientology ...

China attacks the biggest code repository in the world. After battling a distributed denial of service attack for four days, GitHub on Monday was able to restore normal service levels. The primary target of the assault is greatfire.org, which is ...

An American woman--presumably not Muslim, though she doesn't say one way or the other--married to a Libyan man is taken aback when her 9-year-old daughter suddenly wants to start wearing hijab. This is the story of how conflicted she felt ...

NEW YORK, March 27 (Reuters) - Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, ...

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law that took aim at a bureaucratic board labeled by some Republicans as a ...

Depending on the outcome of a hearing scheduled for Monday, a 33-year-old Indiana woman could face up to 70 years in prison for what she says was a miscarriage. Reproductive rights advocates say her case is a disturbing example ...

Spence Jackson, the chief spokesman for the late Missouri auditor Tom Schweich, died over the weekend from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jefferson City police said Monday they responded to a call Sunday evening at Jackson's apartment. They found ...

On Friday, Motherboard reve​aled that fully functioning Uber accounts were for sale on the dark web. Today, it appears that some people have fallen victim to fraudulent trips being made with their login credentials. "It happened this morning," Phil ...

Are conservatives anti-science? Spoiler: Conservatives aren't anti-science or pro-science. But, they are pro-common-sense. And once more scientists adopt common sense approach to science, they'll find that they have the support of conservative politicians - the people whose job it is ...

cracked.com Once the fighting started, a lot of people died, well over a million on our side alone. For the war to continue, a constant stream of new fighters had to join up, and they didn't have the benefit of ...

Here is an interesting article on one of Tail Gunner Joe's sick witch hunts that has, unfortunately, been forgotten. I try not to feel schadenfreude of the fate of McCarthy's side kick, Ray Cohn, but I never succeed.

About the Graphic How should a woman try to get ahead in a male-dominated workplace? Perhaps the answer lies less on women "manning up" and more in how businesses value their employees. Many women confront this tension as they ...

If we accept the idea of Orthopraxy over Orthodoxy, then what does evangelism look like? What is the Witness of those who try to follow the Way of Christ Jesus? To evangelize is to spread the good news that we ...

A short column in The Nation that is a must read. The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn't. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that ...

This is a powerful admission of culpability and I applaud his courage in making it. It really should be read in its entirety. Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system ...

Sarah Vine of the DM gets it wrong: SARAH VINE: Teaching 11-year-olds about rape is a form of child abuse The problem with this country, I've come to realise, is that it treats adults like children and children like adults. ...